The Fundamentals of Travel Photography 1629974811, 9781629974811

Citation preview

Topic Better Living

Subtopic Arts & Leisure

The Fundamentals of Travel Photography Course Guidebook

Bob Krist National Geographic Photographer

PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com

Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2017

Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company.

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Bob Krist

National Geographic Photographer

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ob Krist is an award-winning photographer who works regularly on assignment for magazines such as National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, and Islands. His assignments have taken him to all seven continents. Mr. Krist’s work has won awards in the Pictures of the Year International, Communication Arts, and World Press Photo competitions. He won the title of Photographer of the Year from the Society of American Travel Writers in 1994, 2007, and 2008, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Springfield College.

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Professor Biography 

Mr. Krist’s books include In Tuscany, which features 270 pages of his photographs of the region and is a collaboration with author Frances Mayes. In Tuscany appeared on the New York Times best seller list. Mr. Krist is also the author of Spirit of Place: The Art of the Traveling Photographer, and he provided photography for the books Caribbean; Portrait of the Caribbean; Lowcountry: From Charleston to Savannah; A Photo Tour of New York; and Impressions of Bucks County. Mr. Krist is a Sony Artisan of Imagery and an avid filmmaker who shoots and produces short travel films for a variety of clients, including National Geographic. His movie about Iceland, A Thousand Autumns, won awards at the Johns Hopkins Film Festival, the Reykjavík International Film Festival, and the Trento Film Festival. ■

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Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Professor Biography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i Course Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LESSON GUIDES LESSON 1 | The Travel Photographer’s Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 LESSON 2 | Photographing for Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 LESSON 3 | Three Keys: Light, Composition, Moment. . . . . . . . . 16 LESSON 4 | Natural Light on Landscapes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 LESSON 5 | Natural Light on People. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 LESSON 6 | Composition and the Power of Lenses. . . . . . . . . . . . 44 LESSON 7 | On Location in San Miguel de Allende . . . . . . . . . . . 56 LESSON 8 | Gear, Packing, and Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 LESSON 9 | Five Obstacles to a Great Photo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 LESSON 10 | Capturing the Spirit of People. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 LESSON 11 | People in Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

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Table of Contents

LESSON 12 | Using Flash on the Road. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 LESSON 13 | Capturing the Spirit of Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 LESSON 14 | Special Techniques for Creative Photos. . . . . . . . . 116 LESSON 15 | Capturing the Spirit of Wildlife. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 LESSON 16 | Animals in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 LESSON 17 | Architecture and Skylines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 LESSON 18 | Festivals, Parades, and Special Events . . . . . . . . . . 152 LESSON 19 | Street Scenes and Neighborhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 LESSON 20 | Workflow on the Road. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 LESSON 21 | Photographing a City: Philadelphia . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 LESSON 22 | Photographing a Region: Tuscany . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 LESSON 23 | Working with Video . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 LESSON 24 | Sharing Your Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Image Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Travel Photography Topic Checklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

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Scope

The Fundamentals of Travel Photography

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ore people than ever are documenting their travels through photographs, but creating images that capture the spirit of a place and its people can be challenging. This course, led by a National Geographic travel photographer, guides photographers through the challenges of creating rich, storytelling images while providing them with a wealth of technical knowledge and practical tips. These 24 lessons offer viewers already familiar with the general mechanics of their cameras the skills needed to take their travel photography to the next level. The course begins with the importance of creating visual stories instead of individual images, and the profound effect that giving oneself a mission can have on how a photographer sees and interacts with the world. Many course-takers will already be familiar with the fundamentals of image composition, but this course provides an in-depth analysis of how light, composition, and moment can be captured visually to create striking images that avoid the clichés of selfies and sunsets. Unlike many photography genres, travel photography requires the ability to function across many photographic specialties: portraits, landscapes, art and entertainment, wildlife, architecture, and street life, to name a few. In lessons devoted to each of these specialties, the instructor offers concrete advice on how to tailor your approach to your subject, from breaking the ice with strangers to create intimate portraits to using telephoto and wide-angle lenses to compose striking landscapes. The course also offers a wealth of information on equipment, how to keep gear and images safe on the road, and how to use current technology to edit and share your travel images when you return. ■

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Lesson 1

The Travel Photographer’s Mission

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his course is a comprehensive look at the techniques and philosophies that photographers use to create compelling, storytelling pictures of their travels. Whether you harbor a dream of doing this work professionally or you’d just like to learn how to make more striking, engaging pictures of your journeys, you’ll find a lot of useful information in the upcoming lessons. This lesson kicks the course off by showing how travel photography can be a tool that immerses you in your journeys.

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Lesson 1  •  The Travel Photographer’s Mission

Traveling versus Sightseeing  One of the oldest and most prevalent questions about travel photography is: How can you appreciate your travels if your face is always glued to the camera? National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson likes to make the distinction between being a traveler and a sightseer. A traveler seeks engagement with the local people and culture, while a sightseer just checks off sights in the guidebook. A sightseeing photographer stands apart from the culture, snapping pictures at a distance. A travel photographer becomes involved with his or her surroundings and the people; the resulting pictures become more intimate.

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Instead of using the camera as a vacuum cleaner of postcard views, a travel photographer uses the camera as a license to be curious. The camera becomes a way to engage with the people, places, and animals he or she is visiting. And the camera allows the photographer to bring back stories of that engagement in the form of beautiful, engaging photographs.

Gear versus Positioning  Many photographers concentrate on the technique and equipment parts of photography. And those areas do make a difference. But the truly important part of travel photography doesn’t have to do with gear and technique. Rather, it’s learning how to put yourself in the right place at the right time to photograph the magic moments that capture what a place looks and feels like. That’s where the proactivity of using the camera as a license to be curious comes in. But how does this actually work in practice? Take the example on the following page from New Orleans. After hearing the sound of a saxophone, the photographer found and approached this musician, Rasheed Akbar. The photographer struck up a rapport with the musician, which led to engaging photos.

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Lesson 1  •  The Travel Photographer’s Mission

Techniques such as light usage and composition came into play in photographing the musician, but it was curiosity and proactivity that generated the opportunity in the first place. Traveling with a camera can open doors and intensify, rather than objectify, your experience. That’s the kind of travel photography you’ll learning in these upcoming lessons.

Architecture, Landscapes, and Wildlife  Photographing people is important, but for many photographers, more interest lies in architecture, landscapes, or wildlife. No story of travel is complete without covering these, as well as many other types of subjects.

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Subsequent lessons will show you methods for getting strong landscape, architecture, and wildlife photographs in a variety of lighting conditions. For example, this photograph required a long telephoto lens and a steady hand, as well as finding an animal at the peak of action:

As for architecture, the following photo of Philadelphia required getting up early in the pre-dawn twilight. That was necessary to catch the red light from the sun right below the horizon reflected in the facades of the skyscrapers facing east.

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Lesson 1  •  The Travel Photographer’s Mission

One important variable is that different weather conditions can bring out the most in your landscape and architecture work. Take this foggy morning view in Val D’Orcia in Tuscany:

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You can use conditions like fog, driving snow, and rain to help create a mood in your landscapes and cityscapes. This can lead to pictures that are more interesting than ones shot in perfect sunny conditions. On the other hand, problems like bad light, bad weather, and time limitations are factors both hobbyists and professionals deal with on every trip. Travel is one of the most varied, interesting, and demanding genres in all of photography. In the course of telling stories, photographers capture subjects as diverse as landscapes, architecture, people, food, interiors, street scenes, and sports. What other photo specialty requires such a broad variety of skills? Upcoming lessons cover those topics and more, but visual storytelling is the basis of all these skills. No matter what genre you’re drawn to, learning to be a proactive visual storyteller will result in better photographs. And that’s what this course is all about.

Suggested Reading Krist, Spirit of Place. Stuckey, National Geographic Ultimate Field Guide to Travel Photography.

Exercises 1. Find an issue of a photography-focused magazine and look at the pictures in the layout to see how they help to enhance or further the story. 2. Pick one of the techniques in this article to create an essay: https://improvephotography.com/30816/10-ideas-creative-photoessays/

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Lesson 2

Photographing for Story

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he previous lesson discussed the theory of shooting storytelling pictures of our travels. This one shifts to the specifics of how photographers actually do that. The good news is that it’s simply the application of a few basic principles. The bad news is that it’s probably an unfamiliar way of thinking for many photographers. However, it’s doable. An important mental shift in travel photography is to stop thinking of yourself as only a photographer and start thinking of yourself as a visual storyteller. This lesson focuses on categories you should aim to capture in order to tell the complete story of a place.

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Lesson 2  •  Photographing for Story

The List  An important part of telling a story about a place is capturing many different subjects in the area. The following is a list this course’s instructor, Bob Krist, uses while on assignment. It allows him to cover different facets of a location and fill in gaps in his story as he travels. Geography is a huge category. In city coverages, it would include skylines and street scenes. Out in the countryside, it includes landscapes, which can also occur in city areas. This category can also include aerial views, whenever possible.

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People are another critical category. This includes shots of local people living their lives as well as visitors and tourists enjoying and interacting with the location. Culture is important but often overlooked. Ask yourself: How does the culture of the area you are visiting reveal itself visually? You can’t, for instance, photograph literature. But you could photograph a famous local author at a crowded book signing or event. Also seek out performing arts or people interacting with culture, like museumgoers interacting with what the museum has to offer. Festivals and special events are absolutely great times for a travel photographer to get some photos that emphasize a place’s uniqueness and serendipity. Everyday life is a tough category: How do you make day-to-day life on a city’s streets interesting? It can be done, but it takes a little work and a high degree of curiosity. Sports and recreation are very important aspects of life in many parts of the world, and certainly some of these activities can be photogenic. Even if you find the rules of a sport incomprehensible, what the locals do to relax and recreate is an important part of the story of any society. Wildlife: In certain areas, wildlife plays a big part of visitors’ and locals’ experience of the place. If you’ve identified your location as one of those places, you’d better get good animal coverage. Don’t forget that urban areas have animals, too—take zoos, for example.

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Lesson 2  •  Photographing for Story

Food is becoming more and more of an important part of travel photography. Options for shooting food include finished plates of food as well as the preparation of it. Drinks are an option as well. Shopping is a favorite activity for many travelers. Whether it’s an ancient souk in Marrakech or an ultra-modern mall in Japan, there are some interesting shots to be made of this favorite travel activity. Lodging: Many travel magazines and websites devote a lot of effort to

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showing people what their hotels look like. Those media outlets have an ongoing need for photos of lodging. If you’re going after that market, or you have a penchant for architecture and interiors, you may want to shoot some good hotel interior pictures on your next trip. Nightlife plays an important part in the personality of many places, especially in cities and resort areas. Natural resources: Sometimes a location’s natural resources might be worthy of a few shots. For instance, the fishing industry is very important in Iceland. The activity of unloading the boats is interesting and the fishermen themselves can make for some nice portraits. History: Photographers can try to capture some sense of the history of an area. This can be done through taking photos of historic architecture or monuments, living history reenactments, or commemorative ceremonies that celebrate historic events. Oddities, funkiness, and serendipity: This is a catchall category for those cultural peccadillos that are hard to explain, but can make for some interesting photographs. Take, for example, New York City’s Naked Cowboy. The back of this book contains a checklist of these topics to use in your travels.

Suggested Reading Hurn, On Being a Photographer. Mark, The Photo Essay.

Exercises 1. Develop a shot list for a story about your hometown or neighborhood. 2. Pick a destination story—a story about a place—in an issue of National Geographic and look at each picture. Can you put it in one of the categories from this lesson? Are there some that demand a new category, or any that defy any categorization?

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Lesson 3

Three Keys: Light, Composition, Moment

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ood photographs usually have a long list of superlative qualities, but three elements that they all have in common are great light, strong composition, and a sense of moment. This lesson breaks down each of those three rubrics and provides photographs as examples.

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Lesson 3  •  Three Keys: Light, Composition, Moment

The Three Rubrics  All strong photographs have some kind of beautiful, interesting, or flattering light quality. Regarding composition: If you can’t organize the elements of a photograph in a graphically pleasing way, your message will get lost in the visual clutter. Creating strong storytelling compositions is therefore extremely important. A sense of moment is probably the hardest quality of a photograph to define. Basically, it is some kind of visual epiphany: an interesting action, gesture, or expression that is happening in the split second that you take the photograph.

Example Photograph: Pilot

The above is a strong picture that has all three elements. It’s a photo of the pilot Freddy Cabañas, flying with another biplane in a tight formation over

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Key West. The picture has a strong storytelling, wide-angle composition, with Freddy large in the foreground and the other plane filling in the gap in the background. The light and color are helped by the perfect weather and beautiful blue sea and sky. The planes are bright primary colors, and even Freddy is wearing a red shirt. As for the final element: Two planes flying this close definitely qualifies as satisfying the moment requirement.

Example Photograph: Runners

This is a scene near the finish line of Atlanta’s annual Peachtree Road Race. Because the weather is often so hot and humid in July when this race is held, the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department sets up giant sprinklers under which the participants can cool off after the grueling run.

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Lesson 3  •  Three Keys: Light, Composition, Moment

The light comes in the form of a moody beautiful backlight. The men form a nice compositional trio, but the perspective compression of the long lens lets the viewer see other runners in the background. The trio’s distinctive gestures and their relieved, elated body language provide the elusive quality of moment.

Example Photograph: Flag Truck

This patriotic pickup truck was located on a roadside in Maine. The photographer chose a low angle of view so the truck hid the yard clutter in the background. The wide-angle lens gave a dynamic foreground and filled the frame. It was a sunny day, which created harsh light, but there were plenty of clouds around. The photographer waited until the sun went behind a cloud to get a soft light quality.

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But there is no moment. No humans or animals are around to interact with the truck. However, it’s still not a bad picture even if it only exhibits the qualities of strong composition and nice light.

Example Photograph: Fire Breather

This photo captures the sense of moment, getting the plume of fire at its peak. The lighting is also solid; the photographer judged the exposure for the dramatic orange light from the fireball pretty well. However, the composition provides no sense of place. This took place in Morocco, but how does the viewer know? There are no Bedouin tents or any other characteristic architecture in the background. It’s happening in a compositional void.

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Lesson 3  •  Three Keys: Light, Composition, Moment

Example Photograph: Temple

This photograph captures a rainy, miserable morning at the Borobudur temple on the Indonesian island of Java. The group coming up with their colorful umbrellas turned out to be the high point of the morning. It has some color, but the composition is nonexistent and there are only the beginnings of a moment.

Example Photograph: Rainbow Rainbows are the very model of a fleeting moment, and they don’t occur in anything but beautiful low hanging sun, so all you have to worry about is making the strongest composition possible when these occur.

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In this case, the photographer dropped the horizon down low to make the most of the dramatic arc of the rainbow and used the vineyard fence in the foreground to anchor the composition at the bottom of the frame.

Suggested Reading Bresson, The Decisive Moment. Sontag, On Photography.

Exercises 1. Take some of your favorite photographs and analyze them using the light/composition/moment yardstick. Do they have all, some, or none of these qualities? 2. Practice looking for moments in everyday situations. Can you see them coming in enough time to photograph them? Is there something— like body language or facial expressions—that might give away the approach of a decisive moment?

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Lesson 4

Natural Light on Landscapes

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his lesson explains the many facets of natural light and how to use them in your landscape work. A subsequent lesson will do the same thing with natural light and people photography.

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Lesson 4  •  Natural Light on Landscapes

Light can be broken down into three basic components: 1. The direction of the light, or where it is coming from. 2. The quality of the light, or whether it’s hard and spectacular versus soft and diffused. 3. The color of the light, or whether it’s warm (tending toward oranges and reds) or cool (tending toward blues). If you match the right type of subject matter to the appropriate type of light, you’re on your way to creating stronger photographs. This lesson will provide many examples of how to do that.

Sidelight and Backlight  When the sun is hanging low in the sky and is coming in from one side or the other, it’s producing sidelight. This is great for shooting landscapes, because the interplay of light and shadow help to capture depth and texture. Note: While light and shadow are desirable, shooting in the middle of the day is difficult because the light coming from directly overhead creates shadows that obscure rather than sculpt the scene.

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The photo on the previous page came from Death Valley National Park. More specifically, it’s from below sea level in the salt flats known as Badwater. Those delicate ridges of salt are only visible because of the extremely low angle of sunlight coming from the side. The tone is warm and the sun hasn’t reached the intensity that it will even just a half hour later.

In this shot of a vineyard in Tuscany, the photographer framed the photo to leave the sun out of the picture entirely, but the backlight still etched out the rows of grapevines. At this point in the evening, the sun was still fairly high and bright in the sky and would have created a huge, untamable highlight. That’s why the photographer framed it out.

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Lesson 4  •  Natural Light on Landscapes

This is a photograph of an early fall morning on a beautiful prep school campus. The fall foliage colors, the slight fog that is burning off, and the backlight combine to give it an appeal that might bring the viewer back to their student days. The glow of backlight on land or people tends to evoke feelings of nostalgia.

Diffuse and Dark Light Conditions  This lesson just covered examples of light coming from the side and coming from behind the subject. But what about when the light isn’t coming from any specific direction? In other words, can you shoot landscapes when it’s cloudy and overcast? It’s not ideal, but the answer is yes, as the following example shows.

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This photo is from a cloudy, drizzly day in England’s Cotswolds region. By excluding the flat, gray sky, the photographer was able to make an evocative shot of the master of the hounds with his assistant and charges as they rode up a hillside. The weather gives the photograph a painterly look. It’s much more evocative than a full sunlit version would have been. Can you shoot when there's no light at all? At night, for instance? When the night sky turns fully black, it presents some contrast problems for cameras, and in most cases is not the ideal time to shoot. However, if you want to simulate night shooting, you can’t do any better than twilight. Twilight is the half-hour or so before sunrise and after sunset when the sun is below the horizon, but the sky is not jet black. There’s a royal blue color in the sky and lots of low ambient light around to provide detail in buildings and people.

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Lesson 4  •  Natural Light on Landscapes

Here is the city of Salzburg shot at twilight during the photographer’s assignment to capture the city during the pre-Christmas advent season. Note: How long twilight lasts depends on your latitude and time of year. In most moderate latitudes for most of the year, it usually lasts about 20– 30 minutes. It can be very short in the tropics. In the winters at the polar extremes, it can last for hours.

Quality of Light  How important is the quality of light to the feel of a photograph? What follows are photographs of the same location that the photographer was able to capture under different light conditions.

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The above is the Loretto hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a beautiful example of adobe architecture, but unfortunately, it’s not a beautiful photograph. The light is dull and drab and it has no mood or feel.

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Lesson 4  •  Natural Light on Landscapes

The photographer went back late in the afternoon on a sunny day when sidelight was working its magic on the building. This is a much more interesting photo than the overcast version, but the photographer wasn’t done.

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The photographer came back at twilight for this version of the same shot, which is even better. This series of photographs shows that it is not an admission of failure to go back to the same place over and over again until you get the shot you want.

White Balance  In all of digital photography, there is seldom a subject as misunderstood as white balance. All natural light has a color from warm orange to cool blue, depending on the time of day and the conditions. This color is measured in degrees on a scale that is called the Kelvin scale.

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Lesson 4  •  Natural Light on Landscapes

Theoretically, we want to be able to digitally capture neutral colors, that is to say, a white that is really white and not tinted orange or blue. To that end, photographers have different white balances we can set to help us do this. Shade is a very bluish light. Therefore, when the white balance is set to shade, it will automatically throw in some more warmth to counter the cool blue of shade and hopefully render colors in as neutral a palette as possible. Conversely, tungsten lightbulbs emit a very orange-tinted light. A camera set to tungsten white balance will throw in much more blue to counter the orange light source and render colors neutrally. Rather than forcing photographers to reset their white balance all the time, most camera manufacturers offer an automatic white balance (AWB). This feature reads the color temperature of the ambient conditions and sets the proper white balance automatically.

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AWB is a convenience because it will never allow you to make a big mistake and shoot pictures with the incorrect white balance set. But it’s not a panacea, because many photographers find the automatic white balance settings of their cameras to be a bit clinical and cold. Some cameras will allow you to select a warmer AWB pallete, but most won’t. A practical strategy is to leave your camera’s white balance set to daylight most of the time, but then switch to automatic white balance in areas that have mixed light sources, i.e., a room with fluorescent overhead lighting as well as sunlight coming in through a window. You can also play with your white balance settings to manipulate the look of your photographs. For example, in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny day, you can use a cloudy white balance setting to throw in a bit of warmth. That’s because a cloudy white balance’s job is to correct for the bluish light of an overcast day.

Suggested Reading Adams, Yosemite and the Range of Light. Fitzharris, National Audubon Society Guide to Landscape Photography.

Exercises 1. Go and shoot one of your favorite local views at different times of day and in different lighting conditions. Is there a difference in the quality of the photograph in different lighting conditions? Which light quality gives you the most pleasing results? 2. Practice moving the horizon line in your landscape photographs to see how it changes the composition.

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Lesson 5

Natural Light on People

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his lesson provides examples of how to use natural light effectively when photographing people. Just as a good landscape photograph needs light that shapes and molds its subject, so too do good people pictures. Generally, in the case of people and faces, we don’t want the same specular light quality that we get on a sunny day.

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Lesson 5  •  Natural Light on People

Soft, Directional Light  In most people-photo situations, we want directional light. Ideal light for people photos generally comes in from about a 45-degree angle, such as from a doorway, window, or skylight that does not have rays of direct sun pouring through it. Fortunately, there are doors and windows all over the world, so it’s relatively easy to find some great portrait light wherever you are.

Example Photograph: Fisherman

The doorway was small and somewhat far away from the subject of this portrait, retired fisherman Con Cunningham in Ireland. The light is a bit dramatic, but it still has a beautiful, wraparound quality. For most of this session, Con was looking directly at the photographer while they conversed, but that put too much of his face in shadow. Occasionally, he would gaze out the door to recall a name or a date, and that’s when the light really looked great on his face. That’s when the photographer shot away with the 24mm end of the zoom lens on his camera.

The Fundamentals of Travel Photography

Example Photographs: Plantation

There was a beautiful big window in every room down the hallway of this old sugar plantation house outside Cienfuegos in Cuba. They provided beautiful light down the entire stretch of the above photograph, again taken with the 24mm end of a zoom lens. The man pictured, Pedro, is the caretaker of the house. The photographer began with this environmental portrait of him sitting in the chair. Next, the photographer noticed some of the old ledgers from the plantation lying open on the table as if they were just being consulted—even though

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Lesson 5  •  Natural Light on People

the dates on them were from the 1950s. The photographer asked Pedro to lean over the ledgers, creating a horizontal frame. But it’s the moody window light that makes the shot truly work.

The Size of Light Sources  An important idea about lighting to keep in mind is this: The larger the light source is in relationship to the size of the subject, the softer the light. This means that a window is going to have a completely different effect on a subject depending on how far it is from them. If your subject is standing right next to the source, that light will be nice and soft. But if they’re standing across the room, then the relative size of the light source becomes smaller and the light quality becomes harder and more specular. You can think of this in terms of flash. The little reflector on a shoe-mount flash unit is tiny compared to the size of a human being. But if you bounce that light off a wall, ceiling, or umbrella, that surface becomes the light source. Since it is so much bigger than the flash’s bare reflector, it becomes a softer light source.

Open Shade  An alternative to shooting with window light is open shade, which is the quality of light that occurs on a sunny day, but on the shadow side of buildings. Essentially, the light source is the blue sky, but it’s the portion of the sky that does not contain the bright orb of the sun. Below is an example.

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This photo of a police officer typifies the soft light of open shade. But as soft as the light is in open shade, it can sometimes use a little help sometimes in the form of a reflector. In this case, the photographer’s wife held the reflector off to his right and redirected a little sunlight back into the scene. In fact, you can see some shadow on the wall. The reflector put a catchlight in the officer’s eyes and gave a glow to his skin. Refer to the video lesson for a demo on a typical reflector.

Backlight  Backlight can provide beautiful illumination for people pictures. The light is soft and low contrast, but because of its direction, it often provides a rim light, or a highlight edge around the subject that helps it to stand out from the background.

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Lesson 5  •  Natural Light on People

Backlight often elicits feelings of nostalgia and well-being in the viewer. Because of its ability to evoke those emotions in viewers, many advertisement and fashion photographs are shot using backlight. Note: Take special care that the sun isn’t shining directly into your lens when shooting backlight. Additionally, at times, you may need to bounce a little extra light into the subject’s face using a reflector, a nearby wall, or even a sheet of paper. Any light-colored surface can be pressed into service as a fill card to bounce some light back into a subject’s face. Next up are two photographs that make use of backlight. The photograph to the right comes from the town of Melaka in Malaysia. The shaft of light highlights the woman, who was cutting vegetables. The combination of backlight and toplight separated her from the dark background. At the same time, the light-colored cutting board served as a bounce surface to open up the light on her face and arms from the front. The photographer shot quickly and dialed the exposure back because he knew the dark light would trick the camera’s meter into a bit of overexposure. This is a telephoto zoom lens backed out to about 135mm.

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The sun was gently poking through the clouds in Scotland’s Shetland Islands when the photographer came across this man and his dog coming out of the vet’s office. The gentle rim light brought out the best of both of their shaggy manes, and they shared the same soulful expression. The photographer wasn’t extremely close and used a moderate wide-angle lens; the camera was set for black and white.

Shooting in the Sun  A remaining question is this: Can you take good photographs of people with the sun coming in over your shoulder, essentially lighting your subject directly from the front? The answer is a qualified yes. If there is enough diffusion between yourself and a low-hanging sun, as might happen just before a sunset or after a sunrise, that layer will diffuse the sun just enough to make it a soft, pleasing light source for people pictures.

Suggested Reading Caylor, Portraiture Unplugged. Corbell, Light and Shadow.

Exercises 1. Find a willing portrait subject and shoot them in direct light, open shade, backlight, and overcast light conditions. Which one do you prefer? 2. Using a piece of white foamboard, a commercial reflector, or even an open page of a newspaper, practice finding and re-directing some available light back into your portrait subject.

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Lesson 6

Composition and the Power of Lenses

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his lesson looks at the effect different lenses and composition techniques can have on photographs. Wideangle and telephoto lenses have characteristics that can help make strong compositions, if you know how to exploit those characteristics. Since almost all cameras are sold with some kind of zoom lens these days, this lesson explores composition primarily through the properties of wideangle and telephoto shots. Many can be achieved with the same zoom lens.

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Lesson 6  •  Composition and the Power of Lenses

The Zoom Lens  The popular 18–200mm (or 28–300mm) zoom lenses give an amazing range of perspective. These all-in-one zooms are the most popular choice for a travel lens, and they’re a tool this course strongly recommends. When the angle of view of lenses is discussed in terms of their various focal lengths, it’s always done in terms of 35mm film. In the digital world, this is the so-called full-frame chip that is 24x36mm in size. Different manufacturers designate this size chip with different names: Nikon calls it the FX format, Sony calls it the FE format, and so on. But many of us shoot with cameras that have smaller chip sizes, called the APSC format, in which the frame is 24x16mm. Another variation is the micro four thirds format. This can lead to some confusion as to exactly what focal length we’re talking about, because the angle of view a certain focal length provides is dependent on the size of the sensor. Next up are two views provided by the popular focal length discussed above. If you have a full-frame camera, this would be the 28–300mm lens. If you shoot with an APSC-sized camera, the focal length that covers the same angle of view would be an 18–200mm. And if you shoot with a micro four thirds camera, this would be 14–150mm. Here is the view at its widest:

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And at its narrowest:

That is an incredible range in angles of view, all in one kit lens.

Wide-Angle Shots  The wide-angle shot is a powerful tool, once you understand how to use it. The wide angle expands perspective. It places great emphasis on the foreground and appears to push the background further back. This means that you can make some strong photographs if you make good use of that foreground and utilize it in some way. Leading lines are useful in wide-angle shots. These any lines that draw your eye into a composition. They can be more or less anything: fences, roads, tracks in the snow, etc. By placing them in the foreground in a wide-

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Lesson 6  •  Composition and the Power of Lenses

angle composition, you give the viewer’s eye a path to follow through the photograph. You can find leading lines with normal or telephoto lenses too, but because of the wide angle’s emphasis on the foreground, they’re a little easier to find with the wider optic. Below is an example.

This photo, of pilgrims stringing prayer flags near a temple in Tibet, has strong diagonal leading lines. Those lines of colorful flags lead the eye right to the payoff, which is the pilgrims themselves. This was shot at about a 20mm focal length on a wide-angle zoom lens. Foreground frames are another way to utilize the wide angle. These are manmade and natural framing devices that are all over the place: archways, porches, tree branches, windows, other people, and so on. Take the arches in the following photograph.

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Here, the photographer stepped under the arcades that line the entrance to the Taj Mahal and used their elaborate arches as framing devices. A note of advice: When your frame is extremely dark, make sure to take your meter reading of just the scene itself without the frame. Otherwise, your camera may want to add exposure for the dark area, which would overexpose the main part of the picture.

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Lesson 6  •  Composition and the Power of Lenses

You can also anchor a wide-angle composition by really coming in close on an element in the composition:

In the above photo, the snorkelers are holding the shell and the starfish only inches from the full-frame fisheye lens on the camera in an underwater housing. They dominate the lower frame.

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Telephoto Lens Examples  Just as the wide-angle lens expands perspective, the telephoto lens compresses perspective, making elements in a composition look closer to one another than they really are. This is a useful property:

The above is a scene shot in Badlands National Park, shot at the 300mm setting on a 70–300mm zoom lens. Notice how the hoodoos seem to be stacked up close to one another. That’s called perspective compression.

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Lesson 6  •  Composition and the Power of Lenses

That’s the same scene shot at the 70mm end of that zoom. Things are a lot looser, and the hoodoos don’t seem to be so close to one another.

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In this photograph, in order to emphasize the steep hill of California Street in San Francisco, the photographer backed off for five blocks and shot it with the 300mm of his 70– 300mm zoom. The backlight simplified the scene and made the streetcar rails glow a bit. The photographer waited until there was a cable car at the top of the hill and another one closer down where people were loading and unloading. A telephoto lens is great for shooting unobtrusively or from a safe distance. While this course doesn’t advocate being a “sniper” with your camera, there are some situations that you want to shoot from a distance, either for your own safety or because your presence would ruin the picture. Take, for example, this photograph:

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Lesson 6  •  Composition and the Power of Lenses

You wouldn’t want to shoot anything like this without a telephoto lens. This animal may look slow and docile, but they can move with amazing speed, and the telephoto lens is the go-to optic for staying away at safe distances. This was shot at about 400mm.

Bokeh  The limited depth of field that a telephoto lens exhibits compared to shorter optics is also a useful tool for softening busy backgrounds. The quality of the out-of-focus image behind or in front of the area of sharpness is called bokeh, a Japanese term.

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Four factors determine how much or little depth of field will be in a given shot and, consequently, how smooth your bokeh will be: 1. The camera-to-subject distance: The closer the camera is to the subject, the narrower the depth of field will be. 2. The subject-to-background distance: The further the subject is from the background, the softer that background will appear. 3. The focal length of the lens: The longer the lens, the less the apparent depth of field. 4. The aperture of the lens: The wider the aperture, the less the depth of field.

Suggested Reading Peterson, Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Composition Field Guide. Wolfe, The Art of the Photograph.

Exercises 1. Try to find and shoot examples of leading lines and other foregroundfilling techniques using the widest-angle lens you have. 2. Find and shoot an example of a photograph that is improved by the perspective compression of a telephoto lens.

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Lesson 7

On Location in San Miguel de Allende

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his course has spent several lessons on how to create images that capture spirit and convey story. But what does this look like in practice while one is actually traveling? This lesson shows that by following this course’s instructing photographer, Bob Krist, on a recent assignment in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico.

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Lesson 7  •  On Location in San Miguel de Allende

Example Photograph: Matador

The photographer’s research pointed him toward an upcoming bullfight. Though not a fan of bullfighting, he is a fan of pageantry, so he went early and shot the preparations. The photographer caught this matador in a moment of quiet reflection, fingering his rosary near a small chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. He was a step or two higher than the photographer, which gives him more prominence and stature in the frame.

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Example Photographs: Dancers When the local paper mentioned an upcoming Concheros dance, the photographer had no idea what that was, but he saw a picture that featured some of the costumes. That was enough to intrigue him. The event is a display of pre-Columbian indigenous dances and rituals, grafted onto some Catholic traditions. The conquistadors found it was easier to convert indigenous populations if they mixed the religious traditions. Some of these dances feature satirical impersonations of the colonial powers, and it’s a wild day of pounding drums and spinning dancers.

This is a straightforward scene-setting picture. The photographer was shooting mostly video of the event, but was switching back and forth trying to cover all his bases in both mediums.

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Lesson 7  •  On Location in San Miguel de Allende

A rooftop cafe had a nice overhead view of the dancers. Whenever you cover an event, always look for elevated viewpoints. They can really dress up your coverage.

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After the photographer got his safe shots of the dancing, shooting with high enough shutter speeds to freeze the action, he started experimenting with slower shutter speeds and panning the camera to try to get a sense of movement in the stills. When experimenting this way, the results mostly look terrible. But when one works, they’re a lot of fun.

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Lesson 7  •  On Location in San Miguel de Allende

Example Photograph: Sunshine

Mexico is famous for its brilliant sunshine, and while this can be great for vacationers, it presents particular challenges and opportunities for photographers. The above is a photograph that shows how to make the best of sometimes-challenging natural light. It’s usually not ideal to shoot near high noon, but the shadow patterns of the flags on the colorful wall drew the photographer’s eye. Once he had his basic composition, it was just a matter of waiting until some people came through to liven up the shot and give it a sense of moment.

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Example Photograph: Late Afternoon

In this wide-angle composition, the photographer captured the pattern of the late afternoon clouds in the sky. The formation of pigeons flying overhead provides a sense of moment. There’s still enough light coming into the bottom half of the frame to illuminate the foreground.

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Lesson 7  •  On Location in San Miguel de Allende

Example Photographs: Twilight

The photographer came back at twilight, right after the sun went down. This gave a moody shot with a completely different color palette. In this case, the running girl and the pigeon on the head of the statue of General Allende provide the sense of moment.

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During twilight, the photographer was also sure to capture the city’s skyline:

He also captured the iconic Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, a prominent church:

Exercise Travel to a location and try your hand at shooting it.

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­Lesson 8

Gear, Packing, and Security

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ne of the hottest topics in any discussion about travel photography is what to bring with you and what to leave at home. This is an important question, whether you’re talking about your gear, your clothes, or your preconceptions. This lesson takes a look at what gear to bring and how to keep it safe.

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Tips on Gear Selection Travel photography is all about mobility and adroitness. You have to be able to move quickly, work for long periods of time, and improvise. And you’re not going to be able to do that if you’re lugging an onerous amount of photo gear with you. On the other hand, you’ll be encountering a wide array of situations, and ideally, you’d like to be prepared for anything. The trick is finding a middle ground between preparedness and mobility. An example: A novice photographer with an entry-level, zoom-lens-equipped camera might find herself better prepared for different situations than an experienced counterpart who tries to bring expensive, hyper-specific, and heavy gear. Think of it likes this: Which lens is better—the one you have with you on the camera, or the one sitting back in the hotel safe because it was too much to carry?

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Tips on Smartphones A common saying in the photographer world is: The best camera is the one you have with you. That strongly applies to smartphones, which are a viable choice for travel photography. But like any other piece of photo gear, you’re going to get the most of your smartphone camera only if you’re totally familiar with its operations as well as its strengths and weaknesses. To that end, here are five tips for getting the most out of your smartphone. 1. Pick the right subject matter. Most smartphones are equipped with a moderate wide-angle lens. Shooting good photos with wide-angle lenses depends on utilizing the foreground. Therefore, without cropping or zooming into the sensor, in most cases you are not going to great pictures of distant subjects. That means shooting sports or wildlife is probably not a great idea with your smartphone. 2. Keep your subjects simple. With most phones, you don’t have the optics or the aperture to blur out busy backgrounds, so you are better off if you keep your compositions simple and get close enough to fill the frame. 3. Avoid using flash and look for good light in general. At present, most

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smartphones are still not great in low light, nor are their flash features ideal. If you stick with subjects that are well lit by available light sources, you’ll be happier. 4. Find one or two good camera apps and learn to use them. Learn their ins and outs before you add more apps and more filters. 5. When you need more capabilities, then use a different camera rather than grafting a bunch of extra features on your smartphone. A smartphone’s biggest strength is its convenience. Extra features, like zoom lenses or complicated microphone setups, can begin to chip away at that.

Safety and Security When it comes to travel safety, there are a few basic things that you can do to tilt the odds in your favor. First, try to avoid all logoed clothing and other items or habits that will make you stick out. Avoid branded camera straps and fancy aluminum or molded plastic cases that advertise the presence of a camera. For checked bags, try using generic rolling soft duffle bags. If you need a protective case for some gear items, use a smaller case and pack it inside the rolling duffle. Try not to use black luggage, instead opting for bright, easily spotted colors. You can also use identifiers like fluorescent-colored handle wraps to help your bags stand out on the luggage carousel or if someone should mistakenly start walking off with it.

Hotels As for hotel rooms: The most vulnerable time for your gear is when the cleaning staff is in there, but the threat typically doesn’t come from the staff themselves. The door is wide open and anyone can walk in. The usual routine of these types of thieves, called dippers, is to walk into the room pretending to be the owner and pretending they forgot a piece of gear. They grab the item and walk out.

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To counteract thieves, don’t leave stuff lying about the room. Take your laptop, tablet, hard drives, extra camera gear, and whatever else you have that’s valuable and portable, then lock it up in one of your bags. Next, put that checked bag in the closet. In particularly dicey areas, you might use an anti-theft duffel bag, which is lined with metal mesh and has a thin metal retaining chain. You can chain that to a pipe or a metal fixture. But most of the time, you can just get your gear locked up and out of sight. If you go out again after the room has been serviced, you might put on the Do Not Disturb sign and leave the TV playing at a low volume to give the room an occupied feel. These measures won’t foil a determined thief, but they might prevent or discourage a casual dipper whose best interest is to drift to the next room, where things might be more easily accessible. On a professional assignment, or even as a once-in-a-lifetime trip progresses, you might reach a point where it would be cheaper and easier to replace your camera equipment than it would be to reshoot the photos and footage you have. So if there is a hotel safe big enough to store a laptop and a couple of hard drives, you might use it to lock up those items as well as your passport or and other small valuables.

Exercise Shoot pictures with your iPhone and your camera and see which you prefer.

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Lesson 9

Five Obstacles to a Great Photo

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hough photographers are known to overly obsess over their gear, this lesson doesn’t discuss the technical portion of creating good photos. Rather, it addresses the art of being in the right place at the right time to capture magic moments. In particular, it identifies five common obstacles that stand in the way of a great shot: bad weather, language and logistics, money and time limitations, access, and overfamiliarity. The lesson looks at these through the perspective of how instructing photographer Bob Krist solved them on assignments.

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Lesson 9  •  Five Obstacles to a Great Photo

Overfamiliarity The boom in travel means everybody has been everywhere. The result is that you can no longer count on easy exoticism or hackneyed subjects to tell your story. Instead, you have to dig a little deeper. The Caribbean is an example of this. The region, while beautiful, has long produced generic pictures, like a couple strolling down a beach or snorkeling. Such photos aren’t necessarily terrible, but they only tell a tiny part of the story of this region. An important part of travel photography is to show deeper and different perspectives, and one way to do that is with landscapes. When you’re on an island, sometimes it’s tough to get far enough away to put that landscape in perspective. Hiring a pilot is an option, but a drone can be a cheaper way to accomplish that. Take this drone photograph of the Tobago Cays in the Grenadines:

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In tropics landscape photography, you want the water to look its best. It looks that way when the sun can penetrate it. Therefore, rather than twilight being ideal as with other landscapes, the midday sun is often best. A polarizing filter helps cut the reflections on water and foliage, giving beautiful, rich colors. Another way to avoid generic images of a place is to track down special events, whether large or small. Take, for example, this Hindu wedding in Trinidad:

Here’s how the photographer got that shot: He was on assignment in Trinidad when he noticed a procession of exotically dressed people walk by his hotel. He asked the hotel manager what was going on, and the manager said it was a Hindu wedding of a bride and groom from two very prominent island families. The manager happened to know both families and set up an invitation to the wedding for the photographer.

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Lesson 9  •  Five Obstacles to a Great Photo

Another way to avoid overfamiliar shots is by shooting wildlife. Often, this requires going into areas like swamps, forests, and marshes. That can produce shots like this:

The largest colony of flamingos in the Western Hemisphere is tucked away in these massive salt flats on a small Bahamian out island called Great Inagua. The photographer used an 800mm telephoto lens to compress the lineup of young flamingos with the older, pinker adults in the background.

Time, Access, and Weather On one assignment, the photographer was required to fly to England and ship film back in five days for a photo essay about the Cotswolds. This assignment presented three of the classic five non-technical problems: lack of time, no special access, and dreary weather.

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To make the most of his time, the photographer took a trans-Atlantic redeye flight and drove straight to his hotel in the Cotwswolds to begin working. Knowing he couldn’t depend on nice weather for landscapes for this story, he decided to focus on people. In those days, people in the early winter hunted foxes and birds. By calling different hunting clubs, the photographer quickly found a hunt happening the following morning and obtained an invitation to ride along. That removed the access hurdle.

Riding horseback, the photographer took shots like the above of the hunters riding in foggy, drizzly weather. By eliminating the sky, he was able to get atmospheric, painterly pictures. During each step of this assignment, the photographer continually talked to people in search of tips on other events, places, or people to shoot. That led him to shoots involving bird hunting, a brewmaster, a dining hall, and

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a pub and its resident dog. He also contracted a brief helicopter ride above Oxford, leading to the following shot.

The photographer eventually shipped his film off and made his deadline. The problems of access, bad weather, and a tight schedule were solved with planning, conversation, and composition techniques—not by top-end gear.

Language and Logistics 

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Language barriers and logistics often present problems for professional photographers working in foreign countries. The obvious answer is to hire a guide/translator, but often, as qualified as these folks can be in their professional credentials, they can lack the one absolutely necessary skill that all photographers and journalists seem to share: an ability to talk their way into and out of almost any situation. Professional photographers call people who do have that ability fixers. Fixers are the unsung heroes of lots of published news, feature, and travel stories. They are street smart, history savvy, and endlessly resourceful. Professional photojournalists cultivate a stable of fixers around the world, and if you’re a friend, they’re likely to share the contact info for their favorite fixer in a given place. In lieu of such a network or friends with access to one, photo tours today can serve as fixers for photo enthusiasts. The leader is usually a professional photographer. All the arrangements, sites, and timing will be arranged with good photography in mind. Fixers can be instrumental in helping you find and capture the spirit of place. For instance, the following pictures from an assignment in Burma (now Myanmar) wouldn’t have happened without a talented and resourceful fixer named Tun.

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The leg-rowing fishermen of Inle Lake are great subjects, and it doesn’t take much more than hiring a second boat to get shots like the above of them in action. This was shot boat-to-boat, with a wide-angle lens.

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The above photograph, however, required a good fixer to convince a 120-pound fisherman with an 80-pound boat to let a 260-pound photographer perch at the end of it to shoot through the nets for this perspective.

Suggested Reading DuChemin, See The World.

Exercises 1. Try to make a good landscape photograph in poor weather. Can you overcome the bad conditions to make a compelling photograph? 2. What are some common, non-photo-based obstacles that stand between you and making good photographs on the road? Can you plan your sightseeing in such a way that allows both shooting and relaxation time? Is there a way to achieve a balance?

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Lesson 10

Capturing the Spirit of People

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The picture is not made by the photographer. The picture is more or less good depending on the relationship you have with the people you photograph.

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— Documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado

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algado is correct. But taking pictures of people is a huge hurdle for many photographers, often because of shyness. This lesson explores some techniques for breaking the ice as well as several styles of photographing people.

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Lesson 10  •  Capturing the Spirit of People

Breaking the Ice Breaking the ice is the toughest part of people photography, but there are ways to make it a little less painful and to raise your rate of successful encounters. Rather than just walking up to a person and asking to take their picture, share a little about yourself and why you want to take the photograph. This helps to allay the suspicions that people may feel about why you want to take their picture. Professional photographers have a built-in reason to share: their assignment. But hobbyists can build their own missions, too. For example, a local café at home might be open to hanging a series of your photographs. In that case, you’d be shooting for your exhibition. The point is that you have a purpose when you approach someone for their photo; you’re going to bring back a story. If the native language isn’t one you’re fluent in, you’ll have to learn to explain yourself in a few lines of it. Even if you are totally monolingual, you can always get a couple lines translated on the Internet, then memorize them for this purpose. There’s no one proper approach to photographing people. Different situations demand techniques. The next part of this lesson takes a look at a number of those approaches.

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The Candid Approach The candid approach usually means using a long lens and shooting without the subject’s knowledge. It’s okay to use this technique every once in a while, but don’t become dependent on it. Below is an example.

The photographer saw these monks going in the entrance of the Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia. He knew they had to come out eventually, so he stationed himself at the exit door and waited patiently. Another way of shooting candidly is to simply hang around long enough to become a part of the scene. This approach is a luxury because you need the time to become part of the scenery, but if you do have the time, it’s a wonderful way to get candids.

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Lesson 10  •  Capturing the Spirit of People

When the photographer first showed up to photograph the above fishermen in the Kerala state of India, they were all curious. By the time he had spent a half hour or so with them, the novelty had worn off and they just ignored him. Another way of grabbing candids is to shoot from the hip. Here’s the technique: Use a lens in the 28–35mm range, go into manual focus mode, and pre-set the focus to about 1 meter or 3 feet. Use a moderate aperture of about 5.6. This will allow you to get everything from about 2 feet to 10 feet in focus. It takes some practice, but after a while, you learn where your frame is and you can shoot without looking.

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In the above photograph, from Stonetown in Zanzibar, the photographer shot from the hip to get a nice street scene without disturbing anybody. In certain areas, there are cultural sensitivities to being photographed, but shooting from the hip in silent mode circumvents these.

The Up Close and Personal Approach The opposite of the candid approach is the up close and personal approach. This technique involves getting very close to your subject—closer than the three-foot or so circle of comfort people in the Western hemisphere feel demarcates personal space. The advantage of this perspective more intimate photos. It usually requires using a moderate wide-angle to normal focal length, and the results have a more striking impact than those taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. Take the following photograph as an example.

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Using a moderate wide-angle lens, the photographer got very close to the foremost man and his weathered face. The photographer put his pals in the background of the photo. Wide angles are great for creating this kind of foreground/background storytelling.

The Environmental Portrait One of the most rewarding ways to photograph people is to back off a bit and show how and where they live. This is called an environmental portrait, and in many ways it is the lingua franca of magazine photography. The following photo of a man in a truck is an example.

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The photographer first met this man when he photographed New Jersey for National Geographic. He was a resident of the big wilderness area in southern New Jersey called the Pine Barrens. He was a talented furniture and boat builder, a superb banjo and harmonica player, and an irrepressible personality. The photographer got him sitting in the window of his old truck one afternoon with a moderate wide-angle lens.

Mistakes to Avoid Once you’ve succeeded in breaking the ice and getting your subject’s permission, there are a few mistakes you want to avoid that could lose their attention and cooperation.

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1. Don’t lose them by fumbling endlessly with your gear. Don’t bring a new-to-you camera on a trip: A new camera body means new settings and button placements to learn, and it makes you slow and nonresponsive. 2. Don’t fall silent. For many people, being in front of the camera is a nerve-wracking experience, and if you fall totally silent fussing with your camera, your subject will eventually get more and more nervous because you are not telling them anything. 3. If your subject stiffens up, offer suggestions for props that they may use to help them relax. For example, if you’re shooting a blacksmith, maybe you can get the blacksmith to set up with their hammer and anvil. 4. Try to avoid having your subject stand with his or her weight equally distributed on both feet. When a human being is relaxed, they go into what art teachers call the contrapposto position. They shift their weight to one foot or the other. Think of the famous statue of David, for example. Even the simple act of doing that will result in a more natural-looking stance. But if there is a piece of furniture, a doorway, or a chair nearby, you can also help by demonstrating a possible pose or two to help your subject look relaxed. 5. Don’t forget the moment part of the light, composition, and moment combination. There is a peak moment or two in every still photo situation, portraits included. Shoot multiple frames to improve your odds of capturing the moment.

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Suggested Reading Caputo, National Geographic Photography Field Guide. DuChemin, Forget Mugshots.

Exercises 1. Approach a stranger on the street, break the ice, and try to get permission to shoot a portrait. 2. Try shooting a series of different portraits of the same person. Start with an environmental portrait and work your way in tighter to a head and shoulders portrait.

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Lesson 11

People in Performance

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he previous lesson about photographing people mostly discussed photographing the people you meet in the course of your day-to-day travels. But one of the great things about travel is enjoying people involved in events and performances that highlight their history and culture. This lesson explores some important pointers for photographing people in performance, and near the end, it covers the sticky question of tipping for pictures.

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Lesson 11  •  People in Performance

Technical Considerations When considering how to photograph a show, the first factor to determine is whether or not photography is allowed. The easiest way to find out what is permitted is to ask, but in general, if you’re going to a folklore show in a hotel or some other touristic venue, photography is generally allowed. Still, you should always ask to be sure. If the rules do say no, don’t try to sneak pictures: They won’t be that good and you won’t be making any friends. One of the most common problems in photographing stage shows is overexposure. The predominant reason: Stage designers and theatrical venues almost always employ dramatic lighting that is very contrast-heavy. Cameras’ light meters are geared to lower-contrast scenes of medium reflectivity. When the meter sees a large dark area, it wants to open up to expose for the shadows, and the highlights are blown out. A couple of pictures from the famous Preservation Hall in New Orleans demonstrate this. This one has blown highlights:

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Preservation Hall is a tiny venue, but while the musicians are fairly well lit, the audience and the background are very dark. The camera meter sees all the shadows and wants to open up to record them, but that blows the highlights.

After dialing down the exposure compensation wheel to about –1.5 stops, the audience falls into deep shadow. The musicians—the important part of the photo—are now properly exposed. There are two basic ways you can help your camera meter to deal with these semi-spotlighted situations. You can change your meter to spot meter mode and aim that spot at a lighted performer. Or, as explained above, you can use the exposure compensation dial on the camera and set it to a negative setting. A setting of –1 to –2 will usually put you in the ballpark. It’s not advisable to use an on-camera flash to shoot these shows. It’s distracting to the performers and audience, and the harsh, frontal light eliminates any of the mood and atmosphere from the performance.

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Lesson 11  •  People in Performance

Modern cameras have amazing high-ISO performance, so crank it up and shoot available light for the best results. Once you have your exposure figured out, you can experiment to make the most exciting pictures possible of the performance. For example, with dancers, you can experiment with slower shutter speeds. The ideal shutter speed will render some part of the dancer—preferably the face—sharp as they move, but will also include the blur of a swirling costume. Get some safety shots with an action-stopping shutter speed before moving on to experimental shots. Below are examples of a safety shot (first, with a fast shutter speed) and an experimental shot (second, with a slow shutter speed).

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Tipping for Photographs The line of demarcation between who is a performer and who is just another colorful citizen can be hazy. In some parts of the world where tourism is popular and there’s a big gap in income between visitors and locals, you may encounter professional “characters”: people who are colorfully dressed and whose performance is their appearance. They make themselves up to be appealing to photographers; this is their way of making a living.

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Lesson 11  •  People in Performance

It can be a little hard to tell these performers from simply eccentric people on the street, but with some practice, you’ll develop a feel for it. In some places like Cuba, it’s a popular activity. Take this man, who should be tipped:

He is a professional boulevardier, dressed well with a giant cigar at the ready. He’s extremely willing to pose. One giveaway of these performers in Cuba is that their cigars are never lit, being an expensive prop. Now to discuss the issue of tipping for pictures in more depth: As mass tourism grows and as the income gap between visitors and residents in some areas of the world becomes more and more apparent, the sticky issue of tipping for pictures raises its head in more and more places. If there is not an established custom of tipping for pictures in the area you’re visiting, do not start one. In many societies, tipping can be seen as an insult.

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For instance, in Papua New Guinea, which is a relatively poor nation, you simply do not tip the people for photographs. They are proud and honored that you want to take their pictures, and a tip might insult them. However, in many heavily visited sites, if there is a custom of tipping for pictures, it’s hard to buck the trend. People in such areas have something photographers value—their image—so they wish to make something from the exchange. One workaround is to carry a small instant camera and give the subject one of the images it produces. This approach has drawbacks, though: It’s expensive in the long run and can lead to swarms of people wanting their picture taken. The best advice: Check with a local tour guide, hotel concierge, or tourist board representative to learn if tipping for pictures is expected and customary. Then, try to go with flow as graciously and discreetly as you can.

Exercise Check out a local school production or a band playing at a local pub. Ask permission to photograph and do so without flash. Watch your exposure compensation and look for moments. Share good shots with the performers.

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Using Flash on the Road

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shoe-mounted flash can open up new worlds for a travel photographer. It allows photographers to shoot in conditions that would otherwise be un-photographable. The creative use of even a small unit can make pictures that we would have no way of getting otherwise. However, many photographers revile flash units. This lesson takes a look at why that is and how to use flash units properly to avoid their limitations.

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Basics of Flash A flash unit in a camera’s hot shoe is a small, specular light source that comes directly at the subject. A bright, undiffused light coming from directly in front of the subject is extremely harsh and unflattering. The good news is that it is relatively easy to go beyond this look and use the flash to solve common lighting problems. Here are some important pointers to remember about flash: 1. The tiny flash reflector will not light up a street or a stadium. Think of an on-camera flash as something to light up things right in front of you—no more than 12–15 feet away. 2. Unlike natural light, which diminishes gradually the farther away you are from the light source, the light from a flash unit falls off very quickly. 3. The amount of flash that gets to the sensor is controlled by the aperture. Shutter speed does not affect the volume of flash that hits the sensor. When using flash, use a shutter speed that is at or below the camera’s top sync speed. Otherwise, the shutter will close before the flash has fully popped, resulting in uneven distribution of the flash illumination. 4. Think of your flash as the second light in a two-light setup. The first and primary light is the available light, whatever it is: sunlight, streetlights, room lights, candles, etc. 5. The key to natural-looking flash photography is to blend the flash with the available light. In order to record natural-looking situations in high-contrast settings, you need to lighten—but not entirely eliminate—the shadows. Most contemportary cameras and flash systems do this automatically if you use the “Always On” or “Flash On” settings.

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Example Photographs: Couple

Above is an environmental portrait of a couple. It’s near noon on a bright, sunny day, producing brutal contrast. The highlights are all bright and hot and the shadows are blocked up. However, adding a small amount of flash produced this:

The highlights are still a tad hot, but the shadows have opened up beautifully. The subjects’ eyes and expressions are much more clear. It’s still not ideal portrait light, but this photograph looks pretty good, given the circumstances.

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Example Photographs: Iguana

The above is a blue iguana in the Cayman Islands. This species is known for its characteristic red, bloodshot eyes, which are barely visible in this unflashed photograph. However, adding a small amount of flash created this:

This gives a deeper look into the iguana’s eyes, and also gives a better feel for the texture of its skin. There are still shadows under the iguana’s wrinkles, but they’re penetrable shadows.

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Example Photographs: Jewelry Merchant This sequence shows the different effects of flash, or the lack of it, on a jewelry merchant on the beach in Trinidad. In this first shot, there’s no flash, and his face is blocked up because he’s staying in the shadow of a palm tree trunk:

The next the result of too much flash…The photographer had inadvertently moved the flash setting from auto to manual. This put out a full blast of flash, which overpowered the subject:

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In the third shot, taken after the photographer had realized his mistake and put the flash back on automatic, the merchant receives the correct amount of flash:

Keep in mind that you can tailor your fill flash to taste using your flash’s exposure compensation dial. Many photographers find that they like to tone down the fill flash a bit from the manufacturer’s factory settings.

Shutter Speeds and Flash The normal shutter speed used with flash is called the sync speed. It is the fastest possible shutter speed that will allow a flash to fire with the shutter curtains wide open. A typical top sync speed might be 1/180 or 1/250 of a second.

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Outdoors in the bright sun, using the fastest possible shutter speed that will sync with flash makes sense: A small shoe mount flash can only put out so much light, and so photographers need to keep their apertures moderate. Therefore, a high sync speed is a good thing. But indoors or in low light, available light needs to bleed into the exposure and mix with the light from the flash. Thus, you should use a slower shutter speed to allow the light to burn in. How slow the shutter speed needs to be depends on the conditions. It can get slow enough to introduce shake and blur from a handheld camera. But there are ways of creatively using that blur; refer to the video lesson for examples.

Suggested Reading McNally, The Hot Shoe Diaries.

Exercises 1. Shoot some slow-sync environmental portraits. Vary your shutter speed to let in more or less ambient light. Do you hit a balance between flash and ambient that you find pleasing? 2. Practice “dragging the shutter” by shooting someone riding a bike or jogging across your field of vision in low light.

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Lesson 13

Capturing the Spirit of Landscapes

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his lesson takes a deep dive into the subject of shooting landscapes. For travel work, landscapes are vital for a good, complete story about a place. But that means more than capturing plain, vanilla views: A good landscape shot not only shows what a place looks like, but what it feels like.

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Lesson 13  •  Capturing the Spirit of Landscapes

The Horizon Line One of the first decisions you have to make when composing a landscape is where to place the horizon line. The logical placement of the horizon line helps guide the eye through the composition. In general, if the most interesting part of your composition is in the foreground, you emphasize that part of the photo by bringing the horizon line up near the top of your composition. If the sky is the most interesting part of the photograph, then the natural response is to drop the horizon down near the bottom of the composition. Take the following examples.

The leading line of the above rural road looked OK, but it couldn’t match the cloudscape with the strong diagonal thrust. Therefore, the photographer moved the horizon line down to include more of the sky and used a polarizing filter to make the most of it. But when the foreground

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is the most interesting part of the composition, then you can move that horizon line up toward the top of the frame:

In that photograph, the leading lines of the rock formations in the foreground are the most compelling compositional aspect. With a wideangle lens, the photographer took advantage of the strong foreground and put the horizon line up near the top of the frame. The presence of a fellow photographer up on the horizon line gives a sense of moment and scale.

Elements of Scale In many cases, landscapes can be improved by the presence of an artfully placed person or anything of a known size. That’s because such elements will give that landscape a sense of scale. Remember that while the scale of a place may seem obvious to you in the moment, a viewer looking at your

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photographs later won’t have the same immediate experience. That’s why it’s helpful to place scale clues, as in the following examples.

Seljalandsfoss, pictured above, is one of the most beautiful waterfalls in all of Iceland. But without the presence of the hiker on the right, there would be no way for the viewer to tell how big it is.

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The same goes for these dunes in Dunhuang, in Western China. There were no trees, buildings, or animals to compare to the dunes, so the photographer used the paraglider sailing through the frame to give a sense of scale.

Weather Dissipating or approaching storms are interesting times to shoot because they can produce very dramatic skies and rainbows if the conditions are right. Here are the ideal conditions for photographing rainbows: 1. The sun is behind you and no more than 42° above the horizon. That means early morning or late afternoon. 2. It’s raining in front of you and there are water droplets floating in the air. 3. The sky is clear enough of clouds for the rainbow to be seen.

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The above double rainbow occurred over a vineyard in Tuscany. The photographer had his gear bag in the trunk of his car, and this moment was so fleeting that he had to grab it with the compact camera that he carries on his belt while traveling. Fog is another interesting atmospheric condition for landscape photography. The most common type of fog is radiation fog. It occurs when there are clear conditions that allow the heat that builds up during the day to dissipate at night and cool the surface to the dew point, which can cause fog to appear.

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The above is a fisherman on a foggy lake at dawn in New Hampshire. The photograph is a backlit, long-lens view. The fisherman is the photographer’s point of interest; he’s not placed dead center and is caught mid-cast for the sense of moment.

Suggested Reading Caputo, The Ultimate Field Guide to Landscape Photography. Photographer Charlie Waite’s work often features excellent landscape photography; you can find examples at www.charliewaite.com.

Exercises 1. Shoot the same landscape moving the horizon line to three different positions in the frame: near the top, right in the middle, and near the bottom. See how it affects your results. 2. Shoot some landscape photographs with and without a polarizer filter. When does it work and when is it ineffective?

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Lesson 14

Special Techniques for Creative Photos

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here comes a time in every photographer’s life when he or she wants to break away from photography norms and do something more daring, different, and creative. This lesson shares some techniques you can use when you want to take some outside-the-box photos, including some subtle ones as well as a rather controversial measure.

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Lesson 14  •  Special Techniques for Creative Photos

Black and White Black and white is an old photography standby. A go-to method of producing black-and-white photographs is to simply convert color images in black and white—but that technique makes it difficult to predict how the final product will look while you’re shooting in the field. A workaround is to set your camera to shoot RAW + JPEG, in which the camera produces an image in both formats for every shot. Set the JPEG picture style to black and white. The camera will process the JPEG image into black and white, and that is the preview image you’ll see on the back of your camera.

One black-and-white technique that many photographers find perfect for landscapes and monuments is infrared black and white. Infrared photography responds not only to visual spectrum of light but also to heat

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signatures. Many camera shops can convert a camera to shoot infrared, but keep in mind that this is not a reversible operation. Another option for black-and-white-shooting: Sony recently came out with a black-and-white JPEG mode called rich black and white. It combines three fast exposures—one dark, one normal, and one lighter— into one rich-toned JPEG file all in the camera. This is particularly useful for photos of people.

The Panoramic Format The panoramic format generally involves an elongated aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is the relationship of the width to the height of a photograph. Most cameras shoot in a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio. HD video is 16:9. A photo is said to be panoramic when the width is at least twice the height (a 2:1 aspect ratio). Photographers can shoot digital panoramas in one of two ways. One way is to shoot a series of overlapping pictures set to the camera’s normal aspect ratio, then later combine them into a panoramic photograph in Photoshop or another image-editing program. The other is an onsite, in-camera solution. Since the processors in modern cameras are so powerful, photographers can do sweeping panoramas, where they move the camera across the field of view while the camera shoots a series of stills. The camera will combine them into one panoramic frame.

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No matter how you shoot your panoramic frames, there are a couple of compositional points to keep in mind. You need a scene that has a strong left to right movement. In most cases, you’re not going to be able to go for scenes with big, dramatic skies. Below is an example of a successful panoramic photograph of Times Square before it turned into a pedestrian mall:

The photographer had the camera on a tripod, used a slow shutter speed, and shot at twilight to make the most of the neon signage and the moving traffic. This picture is now a historical record, since Times Square no longer looks this way. Today, nothing moves fast enough to actually generate a blur due to the incredibly dense crowds.

High-Dynamic-Range Photography The third special technique is polarizing in photography circles: highdynamic-range photography (or HDR photography for short). Some background: Most camera sensors cannot “see” the same range of tones from pure black to pure white as human eyes can. Common wisdom is that the eye can resolve about 14 or 15 f-stops of range from pure

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whites to jet black. The best digital sensors are good for about 12 stops of dynamic range. Therefore, what we see with our eyes is not what we necessarily can record with our sensors. Take high-contrast light, for example: Exposing for highlights might block up the shadows, while exposing for the shadows might blow out the highlights. HDR photography takes a series of shots of the same scene at different exposures and combines them into one file. It used to require using a tripod to guarantee exact alignment of all the different exposures, but modern software will correct for small variations if you shoot, very steadily, handheld. HDR uses something called adaptive contrast or tone mapping to make the full range visible. The pictures start to take on a painterly cast or an otherworldly, hyper-real look. Some people love this look because it’s so dramatic and easy to attain. Many traditional photographers despise the look because it can be very melodramatic.

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HDR is becoming more sophisticated as it is maturing. More current versions of HDR software allow for much more subtle work, which means you can encounter high-contrast situations, shoot several versions of the same photo at different exposures, and combine them into a naturallooking photograph. Take this cave scene from Portugal, for instance:

The light outside the cave is likely 10 f-stops or more brighter than the light inside the cave. But the photographer placed his camera on a tripod inside and set the in-camera HDR to the highest setting (a six-stop range). The result was the above JPEG, which captures both extremes of exposure in one, natural-looking frame.

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Suggested Reading Fisher, The Anti-HDR HDR Photography Book. Sandridge, Digital Infrared Photography.

Exercise Try shooting a panoramic image with in-camera capabilities (if your camera has it) or by stitching two or more images together with photoediting software.

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Lesson 15

Capturing the Spirit of Wildlife

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n many travel destinations, wildlife plays an important role. In fact, in destinations like Africa, the Galapagos, and Alaska, wildlife is often the dominant subject. This lesson discusses some basic tips and techniques that will help you create dynamic and interesting wildlife photographs.

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Positioning and Gear Being in the right place at the right time is critical to great wildlife photography. The first step in any successful wildlife shoot is to go to a place where wildlife is abundant. While safaris are the obvious image that comes to mind, your local zoo is a good place to start and a great place to practice. With the possible exception of sports, nowhere is specialized gear more important than in wildlife photography. Long, heavy, and expensive telephoto lenses are the norm among professional wildlife photographers. However, advances in camera technology have provided telephoto cameras known as bridge cameras because they fill the gap between fullsized DSLR and mirrorless cameras and compact point-and-shoots. These cameras have built-in zooms with tremendous range, and they are very compact. As far as raw image quality, they’re not the equals of full-size cameras, but they’re very close. They’re also extremely convenient and generally cheaper. Another convenience of using a smaller camera is that you can use a small beanbag to steady it. (One of the most useful accessories you can have with you on a safari shoot is some sort of beanbag. They’re malleable, portable, and provide instant support.)

Animal Portraits In wildlife photography, a good, clean headshot is a good place to start. As in portraits of humans, concentrate on your subject’s eyes to make the most compelling animal portraits.

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Just as in portraits of people, the key to a good animal portrait is pleasant, soft light and a non-distracting background. Take the above photograph of two puffins, shot with a 400mm lens in Alaska. The background was the surface of the Bering Sea several hundred feet below. That surface was rendered soft by the long lens and the distance between it and the puffins.

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As with human portraiture, you can create impact by moving in very close for a face-only portrait:

Overcast conditions in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda contributed to the above gorilla portrait. This photographer shot it with the 200mm end of a 24–200mm lens. There was just enough soft light around to penetrate the deep eye sockets of the gorilla, and ever-important catchlights are present in his eyes.

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When the sun comes out and it’s in the right place, it can put those catchlights in the right place without creating too much contrast, as in this portrait of an impala in Tanzania:

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Using Flash A small, shoe-mounted flash unit can be a useful piece of wildlife photography gear. Such units can clean up shadows in blotchy light, put catchlights in your subjects’ eyes, and freeze the motion of fast-moving creatures. Take these lemurs:

Those lemurs were located on an island off the east coast of Africa. The lemurs were very approachable and acclimatized to the presence of humans walking around in their forests. But there was a lot of dappled sun and shade around. In order to clean up—but not totally eliminate— the shadows and to put a catchlight in their eyes, the photographer had a shoe-mounted flash going with every exposure. This was shot with a 70–300mm zoom.

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Small-creature photography in the forest can also be improved by using some fill flash:

In that photograph, the flash opened up the shadows cast by the overhead sun on the front of the butterfly’s wings.

Exercise Visit a local zoo for headshots, portraits and behavior shots of animals. Be aware of light and backgrounds as you try to get the best shots possible.

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Lesson 16

Animals in Action

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nimal portraits are nice, but images that exhibit behavior or action are the hardest and most prized photos. The trifecta of light, composition, and moment rules in wildlife photography—but moment trumps all. A moment doesn’t necessarily have to be a dramatic incident or a life-and-death struggle for survival. It can be something as quiet and quirky as an unusual juxtaposition of two animals or a funny facial expression caught in a portrait. Whatever the moment is, you need to be prepared and have your gear ready to capture that gift.

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Yawning The best and easiest way to ease into looking for great moments and behavior is simply to start with animal portraits. Hang with the animals long enough, and sooner or later, those animals are going to stop posing and start yawning, roaring, or chewing on something. It pays to hang around, be patient, and wait for moments like this one:

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Lions often sleep during the day because they do most of their hunting at night. When any animal is rousing from sleep, there’s often some yawning and low-level roaring. The key is to be ready for it. The photographer used a lens in the 400mm range to catch the above lion in a yawn. Next up is a cheetah doing something similar:

It’s hard to predict when these moments will occur. That’s why it’s good to have something like a beanbag on which you can rest your gear while still having it steadied, primed, and aimed. If you try to handhold and wait for these moments, chances are your arms will become tired before your subject starts yawning.

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Interaction between Animals Another type of moment that pops up with some regularity is interaction between animals. These moments make for nice storytelling wildlife photos, like this one:

The relationship between the red-billed oxpecker and the Cape buffalo in South Africa is symbiotic. The buffalo are beset with flies most of the time, and while they are a major annoyance to the buffalo, they’re food to the oxpecker. The buffalo tolerate the presence of the birds because the oxpeckers help to thin out the fly population. The photographer needed a very long lens to get that buffalo/oxpecker photograph. He had a 500mm telephoto lens with a 1.4x converter, giving an effective focal length of almost 750mm. Keep in mind that when shooting with extreme focal lengths, you need to be rock steady and

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you need to ask your driver to turn the vehicle’s engine off entirely. Even the vibration from a finely tuned engine will cause a lot of shake in your image at these focal lengths. Small moments of serendipity, like when a pair of zebras are using each other as chin rests, are rare. You have to be on the lookout because they don’t last long:

This was with a 24–600mm zoom lens taken all the way to 600mm. The zebras only stayed that way for a couple of seconds, and fortunately there was nothing in the background to distract the eye from the action.

Panning

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Not every moment needs to be frozen in time with a high shutter speed. Sometimes panning across the action with a slower shutter speed gives a more impressionistic feeling of speed and movement. The amount of blur in such photos is a result of three things: the speed of the creature’s movement, the focal length of the lens, and the shutter speed you use. With a lens in the 300–400mm range and a fast-moving animal, you may only need to go down to a shutter speed of 1/125 or 1/60 of a second to get a nice blur. The above effect came from panning with a leaping impala. The shutter speed was about 1/500 of a second. There’s a little movement in the

background but the whole animal is more or less sharp. Here’s what happens when the shutter drops down to about 1/60 of a second:

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Only one of the animals is anywhere near sharp; their legs register as a blur, as does the background. But it has a real feeling of speed and the positions of the different impalas are appealing.

Good technique is important for panning. Swing from the waist if you can, and try to keep the subject in the same relative position in your viewfinder as you track it and make exposures. Ideally, the action is moving across your field of view and not away or toward you. It’s important to move as smoothly as possible. Don’t just stop when you’ve made your exposures. In order to keep the movement smooth, you have to follow through, just like a baseball player does with a bat.

Environments and Groups

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Another appealing option is to look for opportunities to shoot environmental wildlife portraits. These are wider shots that show both the animal and its environment in a strong composition: In the above photograph of a brown bear fishing, the photographer included plenty of the waterfall. He had more zoom to work with, but

started out with the looser environmental portrait. The fact that the bear had a fish in its mouth adds a sense of moment to the shot. If you happen to be in a wildlife hotspot that has lots of animals, you can also look to shoot groups or flocks of animals, looking for patterns or

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repetitive behavior. Sometimes group shots can be more compelling than closeups of single animals:

Suggested Reading

Gerlach, John and Barbara, Digital Wildlife Photography. Hopkins, Nature Photography. Shaw, John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography.

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Lesson 17

Architecture and Skylines

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he German poet Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” Unfortunately, many photographs of architecture only capture the “frozen” part of that description. But lively and engaging pictures of a location’s architecture are essential in creating a wellrounded portrait of place. This lesson covers some techniques of shooting architecture and skylines that will help you bring back lively photographs.

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Skylines A skyline is a city’s architectural signature. The big challenge for photographers is to find a way to make familiar skylines fresh and original. One surefire way to get an original viewpoint of a city is to get into a small plane or helicopter and shoot aerials. A drone is another option. However, you can also do things to spice up your photos without going aerial. For instance, a good way to see Chicago is from a sightseeing boat. Another way to liven up a skyline of a city is to look for some activity to juxtapose against it. That task becomes easier for a city that is located on a body of water, as are many major cities. There’s always some form of marine activity you can use. Here’s a view of the Saint Petersburg skyline, shot from the window of a hotel:

The photographer used a long lens, close to 300mm, to compress the bridge and the skyline.

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Iconic Structures Lots of cities have an iconic structure that can symbolize the city all by itself. When you encounter one of these icons, you need to give it a lot of attention and work it from as many different angles and in many different ways as you can. By working and shooting an icon from multiple perspectives, you stand a good chance of getting something that is fresher than your first impression might be. As examples, next up are several different angles of Chicago’s Cloud Gate.

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Lesson 17  •  Architecture and Skylines

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High Vantage Points Looking for high vantage points is a good idea when you’re photographing just about anything, but especially so for skylines and architecture. An overview of a skyline will place it in context, whereas from street level, things may be obstructed. The following two photographs are some examples of high vantage points in action.

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Lesson 17  •  Architecture and Skylines

Reflections Reflections, often in a body of water, are another way to make architecture photos stand out. For example, Mont Saint-Michel in France is in an area of dramatic tides, which can produce reflection shots like this during high tides:

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Extreme Angles Sometimes, extreme measures are the ticket for some drama. Shooting from an extremely low or high viewpoint may do the trick. Take this example:

The beautiful spiral staircase in the historic Nathanial Russell House in Charleston cries out for an extreme angle to make the most of its beautiful lines. For this photograph, the photographer used a 20mm wide-angle lens and some careful framing.

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Lesson 17  •  Architecture and Skylines

Timing The power of persistence is important in architecture photography. If something looks good in one kind of light or weather condition, go back in other types of light and times of day and do it again. The following are two photos of Philadelphia, one in the late afternoon and one in twilight.

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Suggested Reading Van Duinen, The Art of Architectural Photography.

Exercises 1. Do a reconnaissance of a nearby town or city skyline to find a good vantage point. Shoot from that point in two different types of light. 2. Pick an iconic structure, monument, or sculpture in a nearby city or town and see if you can come up with five distinctive ways to shoot it using different lenses, points of view, times of day, and so on.

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Lesson 18

Festivals, Parades, and Special Events

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estivals, parades, and special events are almost universally accessible and photogenic. Unlike shooting dayto-day street scenes, festivals have all the drama and pageantry baked in. But even though the action is planned, costumed, and happening right in front of you, there are still obstacles and hurdles to overcome to get truly strong pictures and storytelling coverage.

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Lesson 18  •  Festivals, Parades, and Special Events

Initial Research An initial hurdle is finding out where and when it’s going to happen. Here are some tips to help you prepare to cover events: ‹‹ ‹‹ ‹‹

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Look at online photos and written research about festivals or events you’re planning to cover. Find out when events are happening and arrive early so you can get shots of the preparation. To find small, local events, stop at local tourism offices and talk to officials. Established tourist locations might have a publication that lists events occurring that week. Local newspapers can be a great source of information as well. If you can’t read the language it’s in, ask a fixer or hotel staff member to go over it with you.

Tracking Down Events Small, local events can yield big picture results. But the real problem comes in tracking down the little local events: the first communions, the village market days, the kinds of events that don’t usually draw an international crowd of tourists, but offer up wonderful little travel photo ops for the prepared shooter. You need more ingenuity to track those down, and often, these local events yield better pictures because you aren’t battling a crowd of fellow visitors and the army of iPhones that crop up at every big event these days. Among your first stops in a new location should be the local tourist office, where you can ask officials about any local events that might be going on. If the location is an established tourist spot and has a publication about local events, get a copy and read it closely.

Varied Coverage

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When a film or TV crew covers a major event, they deploy many camera people stationed strategically around the event. But lone travel shooters don’t have the luxury of a crew to help document the event. However, to really tell the visual story, travel photographers still have to show as many of those angles and points of view as they can. It’s not an easy task, but it’s doable. A photographer’s assignment at the Pooram festival in Kerala, India serves as a case study. The festival is basically a competition among different temples

in the area. Each one tries to outdo the other in the elaborate decorations of their elephants and the energy and passion of their musicians. Below are two looks at the musicians, exhibiting different styles of photographs. In the photograph of the drummers to the right, the photographer used a wide-angle lens to create a strong leading line of the drum corps. The

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vertical composition was cleaner than the horizontal. He used a similar composition for this shot of elephants: The street-level photographs of musicians and elephants added some coverage, but the photographer was still

The Fundamentals of Travel Photography

missing a high, overall view of the event. Police officers were guarding access to the area’s only high building—it was hosting a VIP party—so the photographer brought the officers water. They appreciated the act and gave him access to the building, which led to shots like these.

The Edges

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At an exciting event, it’s easy to forget to look away from the main action and scan the periphery for storytelling moments. But there are often strong photos to be made on the edges of an event, including people reacting to what they’re seeing and participants rehearsing before they perform or march. Take this photograph, for example: In a hot, dusty square in Timbuktu in Mali, the men of the village were

busy performing a very complex sword dance. The light on the dancers was contrast-heavy and hard to shoot, the photographer pulled away from the main event and took this picture of observers enjoying the show.

Low Light Many festivals happen at night. While shooting in lower light presents some technical problems, the gains you make in the mood and feel of your pictures is worth the trouble. Modern cameras can shoot relatively noise-

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free pictures up into some astronomical ISO ratings, so you don’t need to be afraid of the dark. As always, twilight will work better than full night. In the Pooram festival, the photographer was able to catch this elaborately lighted building facade, plus the crowds in front, due to the available light still around at that time of day. Had he waited until later, the crowds in the front would have been rendered as a deep black shadow, with no detail.

Suggested Reading Freeman, Michael Freeman’s Photo School: Street Photography.

Exercises 1. Practice covering a small-town parade. Go to the gathering spot early, shoot portraits, scout the route, and try to make a picture story. 2. Before your next vacation trip, research and see if there are any festivals or parades scheduled during your stay and try to cover one.

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Lesson 19

Street Scenes and Neighborhoods

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o travel story is complete without a sense of what the neighborhoods and street life are like in the town or city you’re visiting. Shooting dayto-day life on the streets presents the challenge of making interesting pictures of commonplace scenes. This lesson takes to the streets of several cities to share some techniques for creating interesting, well-composed, storytelling street scenes.

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Anticipating the Action A large part of the success of any street shooter is his or her ability to anticipate action. This takes practice. You can practice this without a camera by sitting on a corner in a city, scoping out a situation, and trying to predict what’s going to happen next. For example, in Rome, the photographer spotted this priest on his bicycle from across a bridge. He got ready and grabbed this moment of the cleric on his homebound commute:

Anticipating a moment is an important skill to work on for your street shooting. Like many other aspects in photography, it’s one part talent and nine parts practice.

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Finding Shots The hardest factor to overcome in street scenes is the chaotic nature of the subject matter: cars, telephone wires, sidewalks full of people, storefront signage, and harsh light all make for a very cluttered visual presentation. The job of photographers is to simplify that chaos without losing the energy of the scene. There are a few steps that you can take that can help you to do this. Try to avoid shooting in light that has both bright sunlit areas as well as deep shade. If one side of a street is sunlit and the other is shaded, pick one side or the other and shoot in it. To cut down on clutter, you can use a wall or mural as a background for a tableau-like treatment. It gives a very clean look to street scenes. Take this example:

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Another tip: It can help to stay unobtrusive. To shoot in complete silence, consider using a mirrorless camera with a silent-mode option. Most of the time, there’s enough noise in the street to mask the sound of a mirror flapping up and down and a shutter firing, but sometimes there isn’t. The complete silence of the mirrorless shutter can be a blessing. Sometimes, nothing will happen in your chosen location. One of the hardest decisions to make is when to move on to a new spot: Move too soon and you may miss something, but stay too long and you may miss a great situation just around the corner. There is no specific formula to help you with this decision, so trust your gut. It may be wrong sometimes, but others it will be right on the money. Another tactic that helps in street photography is to look for humorous or incongruous juxtapositions. Humor goes a long way in helping a photograph’s appeal, and it’s an element that many people overlook. Not every street scene situation offers a humorous take, but if you’re on the lookout, you’d be surprised at how frequently life’s funny moments pop up. Take this dog:

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For this photo, the photographer got down low with a wide-angle lens to include the doleful-looking dog and the driver in the same frame. It was a rare cloudy day in Cuba, and that soft light helped with the fact that the driver was under his cab’s canopy and the dog was out in the open air.

Higher Ground Sometimes the only way to get an organized or simplified view of a street scene is to look for a higher point of view. When you’re in a city, scour buildings to look for rooftop bars, second-floor cafes with big windows, bridges, pedestrian overpasses, church or bell towers. Any such vantage point might help you get an overview of a city. For example, to do justice to the red-tile roofs of the city of Piran on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast, it’s necessary for photographers find an elevated viewpoint:

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Here’s how that photograph happened: A church on the edge of the old city offered tours of its tower, and the view over town was striking. The photographer took that photograph in the middle of a sunny day. To make the most of the patterns, he shot with a wide-angle lens fitted with a polarizer filter to make the colors pop.

Twilight Twilight—the half-hour or so after sunset before full night sets in—is one of the most evocative times to shoot street scenes. The light indoors and the light outdoors are of similar intensity, so you can see the insides of shops, cafés, and restaurants as well as the outsides. It adds mood and atmosphere. Take this example:

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The combination of an overhead view and the magic of twilight makes for a pleasing composition of this open-air dining center. The photographer used a wide-angle lens and a tripod set up on a balcony.

Suggested Reading Freeman, Michael Freeman’s Photo School: Street Photography. Smolan, A Day in the Life of America.

Exercises 1. Try documenting a day in the life of your neighborhood, school, town, barbershop, or even household. 2. Find a great background in your neighborhood or town and wait for something to happen. Is finding the background first helpful, or a waste of time?

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Lesson 20

Workflow on the Road

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t’s tempting to think of travel photography as a purely creative endeavor: trekking through exotic jungles or exciting street fairs to gather tantalizing shots. But a critical component of travel photography involves the more mundane work of securing and organizing your work. It’s important to be prepared for events like a memory card becoming corrupt. This lesson takes a look at some best practices to help you do just that.

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Backing Up Images As of this writing, phones and tablets are not ideal for backing up images while traveling. They don’t have the storage space necessary. That means that you’ll probably want to bring a laptop and a couple of hard drives for image storage. Modern, ultralight laptops and compact hard drives can make this easier. Backing up images isn’t as simple as downloading your memory cards’ contents to your laptop, then erasing and reusing those cards. That still leaves you with just one copy of your images, vulnerable to failure on a single device. Here’s a sample workflow that will end with two copies of your images: 1. Download all the imagery from your memory cards to a hard drive. 2. Separate the movies from the stills and put the movies in a separate folder. 3. Rename the images from the camera-assigned file names. 4. Write captions from the images; it’s ideal to do this onsite, when information like locations and names are still fresh in your mind and notebook. 5. Back up the renamed and captioned files to a second drive. Efficient digital workflow requires software with a good image browser like Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, or Photo Mechanic. Refer to the video lesson for a demo on Photo Mechanic, including information on how to organize and caption photos. As for dealing with movie files: A good first step to organizing these is to make a note of the date and general content of the clips in the folder name. Later, when you ingest the clips into a movie-editing program, you can assign short keywords to the different clips.

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A good practice is to duplicate your files yet again once you get home. Then, take one of your portable drives and store it in another place—a family member’s house, for instance. That way, if something happens to your home, your work will still be safe. This is arguably on the obsessive side, but it’s not unheard of among professionals.

Developing Your System The workflow outlined in this lesson may not work for you; it’s just a sample. No matter the system you choose, it will work as long as it allows you to back up your work to at least two different drives. It should also allow you to organize and identify your images so you can access them easily when needed. If you haven’t already developed a system, do some research and discover what different people in the field are doing for their digital workflow, both on the road and when they get back. Pick the best ideas from several sources so you can develop the system that best fits you.

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Suggested Reading Clark, A Professional Photographer’s Workflow. Krogh, The DAM Book.

Exercises 1. Take an afternoon’s shoot and download, caption, and back it up according to practices in the lesson. 2. Go back to older collections of photographs and update the caption, keywords, and naming conventions.

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Lesson 21

Photographing a City: Philadelphia

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his lesson presents a case study of how this course’s previously covered techniques work in real life. Instead of a super-exotic location, this lesson shows how to cover an interesting but typical American city: Philadelphia. This is a beautiful city, but to Western eyes, it’s not the most exotic. But it’s still quite possible to produce beautiful, storytelling pictures of this location.

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Lesson 21  •  Photographing a City: Philadelphia

Geography When it comes to covering a city, the geography category is really all about the skyline; it’s the essential scene setter. Philadelphia has a great one, as the following example shows.

The easiest skylines to shoot are those that are available to you at ground level. In Philadelphia, if you wander up and down along the Schuylkill River, you’ll find some great vantage points. In this case, the quiet calm of the river provided some reflections and the late afternoon sun gave some rich colors.

Architecture When it comes to architecture, Philadelphia is a standout. It has a great collection of classic colonial buildings, contemporary skyscrapers, and European-inspired structures and avenues. This section will focus on Philadelphia City Hall.

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The above is a twilight view of the Philadelphia City Hall tower, framed by the facades of the buildings along the city’s Avenue of the Arts.

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As the above photograph shows, if a place looks good from the outside, chances are the interiors are striking too. This is a passageway under Philadelphia City Hall that is flanked with huge marble columns. The photographer used an ultra-wide-angle lens of about 15mm to fit them in.

History Portraying the history of a place can make for a lot of pictures of buildings and monuments. In places like Philadelphia, with its historic district being one of the biggest tourist draws, you can include the human element as well. Take the example on the next page.

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The above photograph shows costumed reenactors hanging out together between the walking tours that they lead all over Philadelphia. The soft open shade light gave pleasing lighting, and the moderate telephoto lens provided just enough perspective compression to make the building in the background come in right behind them.

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Lesson 21  •  Photographing a City: Philadelphia

Recreation A fun category to cover is what the locals do to relax and enjoy themselves. Whenever possible, it’s a good idea to look for recreational activities that may be unique or characteristic to the area. Take this example from Philadelphia:

Sculling along the Schuylkill is a favorite activity for local college and university teams as well as rowing clubs. A long lens shot from across the river helps to juxtapose the rowers against the museum in the background.

Food Every region has its food specialties. Philadelphia certainly has its fair share, but none is better known than the famous Philly cheesesteak.

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In Philadelphia, the photographer chose to shoot the sandwich in its environment, rather than in closeup:

At a restaurant, the photographer shot the process of making a cheesesteak. He got permission to step around behind the counter and bounce flash off the ceiling of the kitchen to get the above angle.

Special Events Tracking down special events is worth doing no matter how well you know the destination. For photographic purposes, it doesn’t need to be a major event to yield interesting pictures. Something as simple as a neighborhood street fair or a small parade can offer up a good photo opportunity. Take the musicians on the following page.

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The first Friday of every month is when the shops and galleries in this Philadelphia neighborhood stay open late, some providing live music and finger food to draw crowds. The photographer shot at twilight so that the light outside and the light inside were about the same intensity, offering a look inside and outside at the same time.

Day-To-Day Life Part of the mission of visual storytellers is to bring back photographs with the feel of day-to-day life. Philadelphia has a wide assortment of neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive feel. Take, for example, these two photographs of two different areas of the city.

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Society Hill is quiet and leafy. The use of a long lens stacks up the flags, and soft overcast light makes the colors pop.

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Lesson 21  •  Photographing a City: Philadelphia

Chinatown is lively and vibrant. The photographer used a wide-angle lens, extremely low point of view, and twilight to make the most of the above photograph.

Serendipity Philadelphia doesn’t disappoint when it comes to unusual sights. Most of the time the serendipity is spontaneous, but sometimes it’s the nature of the attraction itself. Take the next page's photograph of the Eastern State Penitentiary, a closed prison turned tourist attraction.

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The photographer used a wide-angle lens, a high point of view, and backlight. He also capitalized on the leading lines of the long hall.

Suggested Reading Gattuso and Krist, Insight City Guide Philadelphia.

Exercise Shoot skylines of a city near you.

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Lesson 22

Photographing a Region: Tuscany

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his course’s instructor collaborated with writer Frances Mayes to produce the book In Tuscany. This lesson shows several photographs from that assignment along with brief notes about how and why they were taken.

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Lesson 22  •  Photographing a Region: Tuscany

A Special Technique During an assignment before the one for In Tuscany, the photographer developed a special technique for achieving an impressionistic look incamera. It involved using a low-contrast, high-speed, and very grainy color slide film, Agfachrome 1000. To get the warm, impressionistic look he wanted, the photographer coupled this film with a so-called filter sandwich. Using a square filter holder, he put in either a warming filter and a glass diffusion or fog filter. The results from this film stock and filter pack produced grainy, painterlylooking photographs. Not all of the photographs from the In Tuscany assignment used this technique, but some do.

Sample Photographs

The above is the road to La Foce, a beautiful old estate outside Montepulciano. Such landscape photos are essential to capturing the

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essence of a place, so the photographer sought them out during his In Tuscany assignment.

Early morning fog is a common occurrence in the spring in Tuscany. Remember: To capture photos like this, always watch the weather reports. When the daily dew point falls below the low nighttime temperature, you can count on fog filling the valleys.

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Lesson 22  •  Photographing a Region: Tuscany

The monks of Tuscany’s Abbey of Sant’Antimo used to chant every morning, but in 2015, they were all moved back to a different abbey in France. Therefore, this photographer wouldn’t be able to replicate this shot now. That’s why documenting culture is so important: There’s no guarantee that it will always be there.

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This course has often mentioned how powerful creative framing can be. In the above instance, the photographer used the trees to frame this view over the countryside from a belvedere in the town of Cortona. The silhouettes and gestures of the couple in conversation give the picture a sense of moment.

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Lesson 22  •  Photographing a Region: Tuscany

Street scenes are all about capturing moments that sum up the local flavor. Here, the interaction of the grandmother with the baby on a side street says it all. Remember: When you see a situation like this developing, stop, get yourself organized, and try to anticipate the peak moment, like when grandmother bends down over the carriage to play with the child.

To capture the Tuscan lifestyle of long, lingering dinners in bucolic settings, the photographer shot the above candlelit dinner at a photo workshop he taught outside the small town of Buonconvento.

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To the photographer, this man personified the ebullience of the Tuscan lifestyle. The photographer used some fill flash to open up the shadows when he shot the man talking to and soothing his horse.

Suggested Reading Alt, Unknown Tuscany. Mayes and Krist, In Tuscany.

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Lesson 23

Working with Video

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s time goes on, people spend more time consuming media on screens than on the printed page. There are two things that screens almost demand that the printed page just can’t deliver. Those two things are motion and sound— the components of video. This lesson goes over some basic pointers that will help you if you decide to begin exploring videography.

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Lesson 23  •  Working with Video

Shooting Video When learning to shoot video, the most important thing for still shooters to learn is to sequence their vision. That is, they should stop trying to get the whole story in one shot. Video is about breaking a process or event down into pieces, not summing it up into one shot.

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A good way to begin to learn this is to keep in mind the so-called five shots and the five angles. The five shots give basic elements for creating a visual story with a variety of depth. Here are the five shots: 1. The wide establishing shot, which sets the scene. 2. The medium view, typically a street scene or a room interior. 3. The portrait or two-person shot. 4. Close-ups or extreme close-ups, which are the all-important detail shots of features like hands or eyes. 5. The point-of-view shot, which shows what the scene looks like from the point of view of a participant.

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Unlike with still shots, videographers dissect every scene they shoot into smaller pieces so they can create sequences during editing. While the five key shots will vary depending on what you’re shooting, they typically go something like this:

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1. A close-up of an action. 2. A close-up of the person who is conducting the action. 3. A closeup of a reaction to the action. 4. A point-of-view shot from the perspective of the person who is conducting the action. 5. A creative beauty shot (or more than one such shot) relating to the action.

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When you’ve covered the five shots of an action using multiple angles, you’ve created a sequence. Keep in mind that close-ups are extremely important: They give video editors ways to make sequences and move from one scene to another.

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Lesson 23  •  Working with Video

Time and Story One technique that still shooters may have trouble with is illustrating the passage of time in video. That’s because still shooters are trained to following the action wherever it goes. A still photographer wouldn’t dream of letting their subject walk out of the frame, but that’s exactly what video requires to give the editor a way to illustrate the passage of time. Refer to the video lesson for a tutorial on how letting the subject leave the frame assists video editors. In the world of video, beautiful visuals and evocative music will hold the attention of your viewers for only so long. Eventually, there needs to be a story for your audience to follow. Here is one simple story structure you can use: 1. Open with your best or moodiest visual. 2. Introduce your main character and state the problem or topic. 3. Show your character going through a process. Does the process change or reveal something about the character? 4. Wrap up with a “kicker,” a visual reference to your opening.

Gear To get started with video, the financial barrier is relatively low. All you need to start besides your camera and tripod is a small microphone for your camera’s hot shoe and a variable neutral density filter to help control exposure. While the sensors in most cameras can provide superb video quality, their microphones tend to be bad. That’s a problem: In video, audio is one of—if not the most—important element to

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get right. While people will tolerate some subpar visuals, they will not put up with scratchy, inaudible, or distorted audio. Therefore, investing in a small, on-camera microphone will dramatically improve your videos. Also spring for a wind muffler for your microphone; these cut down on the annoying sound of wind blowing across your microphone. As for the neutral density purpose: It’s important because in video, we are more or less stuck with using only one shutter speed. That shutter speed, in order to give the right amount of blur between frames, should always be around twice the framerate of the video. Currently, most video is shot at 24 frames per second. That rate gives a result that looks more cinematic. That means we need a shutter speed of around 1/48 of a second. On most photography-centered cameras, the closest equivalent will be 1/50 of second. On a bright sunny day, shooting with ISO 100 with a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second, the aperture would have to be set to f/22. Some lenses don’t even go down that far, and even if they do, what happens if you want to shoot something with the soft background you get at f/2.8? That’s where the variable neutral density filter comes in. With it attached to the front of the lens, you can dial out as much light as you want to get down to your desired aperture, all while keeping your shutter speed at that allimportant 1/50 of a second.

Suggested Reading Ball, Carman, and Gottshalk, From Still to Motion. Lancaster, DSLR Cinema.

Exercises 1. Try to shoot a short video story about making breakfast or some other day-to-day process using the five angles and the five shots. 2. Go to vimeo.com and watch a few staff picks in the travel category.

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Lesson 24

Sharing Your Stories

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his course has covered the ins and outs of creating rich, vibrant, and spirit-filled images of your travels. But there comes a time after every trip that photographers want to share their stories with family, friends, and other audiences. This lesson takes a look at ways you can share and publish the visual stories of your travels on both print and digital platforms.

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Lesson 24  •  Sharing Your Stories

Print-On-Demand Books Years ago, it took a small fortune to print a run of coffee-table books. But now, thanks to print-on-demand books, you can lay out and print your own hardcover photo book for a reasonable price. You won’t get rich selling them, but they can be among the most satisfying things you can do with a carefully edited set of storytelling photos from your last trip. There are many print-on-demand book services available, and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. But they also usually have a very easy to learn layout program to help you design the best looking book possible. Many services have templates to help you organize and present your work. The first step in creating your coffee-table book is to have a tightly edited set of storytelling pictures. Hopefully, you’ll have pictures that include overall sweeping views, portraits, street scenes, and close-ups. Be hard on yourself in editing: You can’t show every picture you shot, nor should you want to. If you want to make an impact with your photographs on a printed page, run them big: full page or double page. Every once in a while, you can break that up with a multiple-picture layout, but you’ll want fewer, bigger pictures overall. Also remember that you need a variety of types of pictures to tell a photo story. Keep in mind the five angles from the video lesson: the overall view, the medium view, the portrait, the close-up, and the point-of-view shot. These are the building blocks of visual storytelling, and you need all of them to create a photo essay rather than a random collection of pictures.

Digital Publishing Getting your work between two hard covers is wonderful, but you’ll reach a much wider audience if you publish your work on the Internet. You can do that in a variety of ways, but they basically fall into two categories:

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a words-and-pictures approach similar to a print article, or a multimedia approach, using stills, music, and motion in a more movie-like approach. The first step in preparing a multimedia slideshow is to select your photos. You can edit a little more loosely than for print, but you still need to be discriminating: Don’t throw every picture you shot up there. Research has shown that a running time of 1–2 minutes is ideal for Internet consumption. That may sound short, but you’ll rarely leave a photo up on the screen for more than 3–4 seconds. That comes out to approximately 30 pictures for a two-minute show. After you assemble and resize your excellent collection of photos organized around a theme or story, the next thing to do is to pick some appropriate music. You likely won’t be able to pick your favorite song from your favorite group, as it is difficult and expensive to license the rights to the majority of popular songs. Instead, search through the many

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libraries available online for this purpose. Sites that offer content under Creative Commons licenses are a good place to start. Be sure to carefully review conditions for using and crediting any music you choose. Once you have your pictures and your music selected, it’s time to put them together. You can do this in any non-linear editing program for making movies, and there is also software specifically designed to make these slide shows. If you’re not that interested in using movement and audio with your photographs, the good news is that there are more traditional sites online that can help you to put together web-formatted stories in a very striking way. One example is Maptia.com; it specializes in travel stories and boasts some of the world’s top travel photographers as contributors. Sites like Maptia are full of interesting stories told by passionate travelers with a point of view and a desire to share their knowledge and experience of the world. Before you post on such a site, though, it’s a good idea to have an experienced writer or editor go over your text. On platforms like this, the words take on as much weight as the photos, so they need to be effective.

Suggested Reading American Society of Media Photographers, “Copyright Alliance.” https://www.asmp.org/resources/advocacy/copyright-alliance/. American Society of Media Photographers, “Copyright Reform.” https://www.asmp.org/resources/advocacy/copyright-reform/.

Exercises 1. Download the Bookwright software from blurb.com and create a short book from a tightly edited set of pictures from a recent trip. 2. Go to maptia.com. With a set of tightly edited pictures and a short text story, put together an online travel story.

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Image Credits All images © Bob Krist except for the following: Page 2–3: © NataliaDeriabina/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 10–11: © LDProd/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 16–17: © Narathip12/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 24–25: © Soft_Light/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 36–37: © Design Pics/Darren Greenwood/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 44–45: © scyther5/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 56–57: © bpperry/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 66–67: © bach005/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 68: © bogdandreava/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 69: © Blackzheep/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 71: © Korrawin/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 72–73: © Givaga/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 82–83: © Valueline/Thinkstock. Page 90: © Jasmina81/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 92–93: © TongRo Images Inc/Thinkstock. Page 100–101: © squidmediaro/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 107: © rui_noronha/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 108–109: © Givaga/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 116–117: © IakovKalinin/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 124–125: © karelnoppe/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 132–133: © ipek67/iStock/Thinkstock.

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Image Credits

Page 142–143: © Thomas Brown/DigitalVision/Thinkstock. Page 152–153: © giocalde/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 160–161: © irakite/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 168–169: © kieferpix/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 170: © stigmatize/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 171: © scyther5/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 172: © burakkarademir/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 174–175: © SeanPavonePhoto/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 186–187: © jenifoto/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 194–195: © Mike Watson Images/moodboard/Thinkstock. Page 196 (city view): © SeanPavonePhoto/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 196 (street view): © Creatas Images/Creatas/Thinkstock. Page 196 (portrait view): © Granger Wootz/Blend Images/Thinkstock. Page 196 (close-up view): © Image Source Pink/Thinkstock. Page 196 (point-of-view): © jacoblund/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 197 (cycle race): © Ryan McVay/DigitalVision/Thinkstock. Page 197 (cyclist close-up): © moodboard/Thinkstock. Page 197 (fans cheering): © monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 197 (cyclist point-of-view): © Manuel-F-O/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 197 (water spalsh): © Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock. Page 198: © nikkytok/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 200–201: © jakkapan21/iStock/Thinkstock. Page 203: © f9photos/iStock/Thinkstock.

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Travel Photography Topic Checklist LOCATION: _______________________________________ †† People Notes:

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†† Natural Resources Notes:

†† Sports and Recreation Notes:

†† History Notes:

†† Wildlife Notes:

†† Oddities, Funkiness, and Serendipity Notes:

†† Food Notes:

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